Adam and Eve justified eating the forbidden fruit by blaming each other, blaming the serpent, and blaming God. As natural as breathing air, we human beings draw an imaginary line between good and evil. Then we place ourselves on the good side of the line. Sometimes we place someone else on the evil side of that line. We blame the evil person. We verbally curse or physically punish that person. And we do so in the name of the good. This mechanism has a name: scapegoating. Read more
I believe the concept of sin is one of the brightest lights the public theologian can shine into the darkness of racism, jingoism, family abuse, and our daily fare of maligning rhetoric. Here's my observation: When in self-justification we draw a line between good and evil, we place the scapegoat on the other side. Read more
Can science dispense with relgion? No. Not if you're Iranian theoretical physicist Medhi Golshani. Read more
Karen Bloomquist: Another Worldview Must Be Enacted Today Patheos PT 5013 Ted Peters along with Karen Bloomquist are both writing in this post. Ted Peters here. In addition to discourse clarification, I have held that the public theologian should be continually engaged in worldview construction. As the very term, worldview, suggests, we are considering two things at once: the world and the way we view it. Even if we are aware that there is more to the cosmos than what... Read more
October 31, the eve of All Saints, is not just Halloween. It’s also Reformation Day. Protestants celebrate this festival to remember the date when Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses on the chapel door of Wittenberg Castle. This lit the fuse on a bang heard ‘round the world for five centuries. The central tenet of the Lutheran version of the Protestant Reformation is concise: we are justified by faith. That’s it! Nothing more! For John Calvin, justification-by-faith is the “main hinge... Read more
It appears to SBNRs (Spiritual But Not Religious) and the wider public that science and religion are at war. This need not be the case. Christian theology requires fides et ratio, faith plus reason. Read more
Would confirmation of an extraterrestrial intelligent civilization cause terrestrial religious traditions to face a crisis or even collapse? The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey suggests that most religious devotees would welcome space aliens to their BBQs. Read more
Should religion go extinct? Should we accelerate evolution by killing off religion? Just as the Chicxulub asteroid 65 million years ago killed off 75% of life on Earth, including all non-avion dinosaurs, should we today take control of our evolutionary future by deselecting religion? No. Rather, the public theologian should ask about religions foundations. Does God exist? If God exists, is God gracious? Read more
The Christian doctrine of sin reveals the secrets of our human condition like an x-ray camera reveals what's under our skin. As an exercise in public theology, let's x-ray the dark shadows of daily human life. Let’s get real about our human predicament. Read more
Should Christians dump Darwin for creationism or intelligent design? No. There is no war between science and religion. Yet, the Christian are still losing. Why? Read more
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